We have a new update to Goombah out as of last night. (For any new readers of this blog, Goombah is our product for creating communities of people with similar tastes for purposes of recommendation and discussion, based on music listening history data stored in Apple's iTunes software on OS X.) We also have a new release notes page.
One thing to check out is the Adventurousness slider in Goombah:Preferences:Options. This is an important feature (and one we should perhaps make more prominent in the UI). Slide it to the left, and you'll get recommendations that have a broad consensus of approval among your neighbors. As you slide it to the right, recommendations will be more and more weighted to being sensitive to the tastes of individual people -- the farther you go, the more influence is derived from a single person playing a song more frequently than she plays other songs.
That brings me to another point -- Goombah is not based on music ratings. It's based on a probabilistic analysis of the frequency with which you play various songs. So there is no effort involved in using Goombah -- if simply looks at your iTunes data to see what you've been listening to, and finds others with similar tastes.
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